The next morning we were ready to go early. My family hadn’t slept all that well the night before. They weren’t as tired as they had been the last two nights, and the crowded conditions had kept them up. We were all still sore from the previous days of hauling, too. Tempers got a bit frayed.
But they didn’t stay frayed. As day moved on into day, as each of us discovered what we could do well, or ways to be helpful to all the others in the group, we became, if not friends, at least compatriots. We were doing something important, together. Day followed day, and turned into weeks, and still we went on.
I got to see Meical much more often as time went on. A couple of days after we left that first outpost, he was one of the ‘Farmers’ that came over to help us pull. It was easy for me to obligate him to stay for dinner and then to sleep with us. It was hard on him, and hard on Mother, but I managed to play the obligations off each other.
Mother continued to struggle with the whole privacy issue. Having all of her children sleep a few feet, or even inches, away from her and Father was hard enough. Having a stranger in the home made it worse.
As a bit of advice: if you are going to invite a stranger to sleep in your house with you, an Elf is the one to pick. Their culture, as I am sure you know, places a high priority on privacy--and not privacy like Dwarves have. For a Dwarf, if the door isn’t closed, or the curtain has a crack in it, you can look, or listen, or whatever. No one would think of yelling at you for it. It is up to them to make sure that everything is closed or whatever.
For Elves it was the opposite. They had no curtains, no doors, etc. Instead they had ‘mental’ privacy. You didn’t ‘see’ even things that were right in front of your face, if they weren’t yours to see. And you didn’t hear things that weren’t yours to hear, even if they were so loud you couldn’t have missed them.
I think Mother actually had the best of it, in the end. She came to understand that Meical really didn’t ‘see’ or ‘hear’ her private matters. He, on the other hand, had to get used to all of us staring at him whenever he was visible, or listening to every conversation we could hear.
Another wonderful thing that happened during this time is that I made friends with a Horseboy. His name was Nhomhisosh. It was funny how it happened…
“I can’t believe that we have to burn this stuff,” I muttered, picking up yet another beast dropping and putting it in my collection bag.
“It is just fuel,” Meical responded.
“Just fuel! You may have been an Elf before, but you’re a Farmer now, and I doubt they really think of this as ‘just fuel’.”
“No. They also think of this as food for their plants.”
I sighed. Meical could be so irritating sometimes when he put on his ‘Elf’ hat.
“You all collect that stuff, eh?” Meical and I turned. There on top of a small rise was a Horseboy, sitting on his horse, grinning at us. Perfect. Just what I needed! Luckily Meical’s ability to talk about anything without being embarrassed came to the fore here as well.
“Certainly. In the absence of other combustibles, it is necessary to use this as fuel.”
“Well. All I can say is I’m glad I don’t have to use it.” He paused. “Say, I know where you can get more of this, a lot more.”
“Great,” I said. “Lead us to it. The faster we can get this done, the better. Say, what is your name? I am Heinrich, and this is Meical.”
“My name is Nhomhisosh.” He stared at Meical. “You look like a Farmer, but your name is that of an Elf. Are you transformed?”
While Meical told him all about turning into a Farmer for the trip, I stood pondering.
“Say, is this what you all do all the time? Shuttle people back and forth?”
“It is what my family is doing right now. We Horsemen do several different things here. One of them is, as you mentioned, shuttling new colonists up the series of forts. The beasts have been pushed back, but some still break through. Three weeks ago we fought off an attack on our convoy. Others of our people are engaged in the grand hunts. Still others, patrol the ‘border’, the area that we believe is relatively free of beasts.”
“I thought that you all also carried the mail.”
“That is not our families. Our young males who are ready to mate have that job.” My ears burned at this casual way of putting it, but he continued without noticing. “They can’t stay with their herd anymore, and they need a job in order to prove themselves worthy for their wives. At least, that is the way it was back on the island. More and more now, we get our wives right away when we sign up for some job.”
He led us to a small stream. “The beasts come here to drink, and so you can often find a lot of-- those things.”
Indeed we did. We had our bags filled in minutes.
“Hey. Thanks.” I said. Then, after a pause, “I don’t know much about Horsemen. Would you like to, uh, get together sometime?”
He looked confused, “Get together?”
“Yeah. Like to get together and talk, and play, and such.”
He walked beside us for a few minutes. “I’ve never done anything like that outside of our herd. I’ll think about it.” And he galloped off.
Meical looked at me. “You asked a Horseboy to play?”
“Well, he’s a ‘boy’ too, isn’t he?”
“You are amazing, Heinrich. But I like knowing you. Come on, let’s get back and tell the others. We’ll save them a lot of work.”
Nhomhisosh must have ‘thought about it’ for he came riding up to the train first thing the next morning, just as we were finishing breakfast. I didn’t know it was him at first, I thought it was some message rider. But I noticed, indeed everyone noticed, him going down the entire line of wagons, until he came to ours.
“So, when are you free to ‘play’?” Horsemen aren’t very good at manners. I stood.
“Father, Mother, this is Nhomhisosh, a Horseboy I met yesterday. I asked him if he would like to play with me. Nhomhisosh, this is my Father and my Mother and my oldest Sister, Gertrude.”
“Father, could we arrange my first turn pulling now, so that Nhomhisosh will know when to come back for Meical and I?”
Meical had spent the night, as he was doing almost all the time now. He would pull with us for a while, then go back to his family, but was always back around dinner time, and usually much earlier…to ‘help,’ of course.
Father looked up at Nhomhisosh. “I am pleased that my Son is making such an effort to get to know the other races. We all need to do this more if we are to succeed on this new land.” (Trust an adult to put that kind of spin on a simple desire to play.) “It might be hard if we tried to schedule your visits. Heinrich may play with you whenever you come, as long as he isn’t gone more than three hours out of the working day.”
This was joy. I thought of something else to make it more attractive to Father, “And Father, I can bring along my carrying bag, and Nhomhisosh can help me gather more--fuel.”
Father looked at me, “Yes, you may do that. But your other goal, getting to know boys of other races, is more important. I don’t know of any Dwarf boy who has ever befriended a Horseboy. It is a very good thing. As good as--” he grinned. “Say, why don’t you teach him to swim?”
Thank you for reading Von’s Substack. I would love it if you commented! I love hearing from readers, especially critical comments. I would love to start more letter exchanges, so if there’s a subject you’re interested in, get writing and tag me!
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Von also writes as ‘Arthur Yeomans’. Under that name he writes children’s, YA, and adult fiction from a Christian perspective. His books are published by Wise Path Books and include:
The Bobtails meet the Preacher’s Kid
and
Soon to be coming out is GK Chesterton’s wonderful book, “What’s Wrong with the World”, for which ‘Arthur’ wrote most of the annotations.
Arthur also has a substack, and a website.
Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von